Headline: “Old Dog Learns New Trick, Teens Unimpressed”

Check me out, I learned how to use Excel today. I haven’t used a spread sheet since I was a high school teacher, and that was on an Apple II e- yes, I am officially a dinosaur. There have been many, many times recently that I would have benefited from having this skill and it was curiosity that finally drove me to it. I wanted to know how many calories were in one of my Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Sticking to about 1200 calories/day? You're looking at more than a complete meal if you have that milk, too.
Sticking to about 1200 calories/day? You’re looking at more than a complete meal, over 500 calories, if you have that milk, too.

Fortunately for me, I converted my go-to recipes to grams instead of cups- try it, you can whack out a batch of sweets in no time flat when you aren’t fighting to cram shortening into a one cup measure. All I do now is place my mixing bowl on my handy-dandy digital scale, dump an ingredient into my work bowl and zero out the weight with each new ingredient.

All it took was double checking calories per gram of ingredients on a couple of web sites and voilà! When it came to finding all the calories per gram of ingredient, Google was great, so were company websites, like Nestle. All the info you didn’t want to know about home made cookies, now in one convenient spot.

To all my friends who have been eating these cookies over the years, don’t look…. Sorry.

Chocolate Chip Cookies
# of Cookies 144
Total Cal 13789
Total Cal/cookie 95.75
ingredient cal/gram # of grams total cal/cookie
flour 4 675 2700 18.75
white sugar 4 620 2480 17.222
brown sugar 4 445 1780 12.3611
shortening 9 330 2970 20.625
butter 7 110 770 5.3472
chips 5 545 2725 18.923
egg (per) 72 4 288 2
vanilla (T) 38 2 76 0.5277
not all ingredients are listed…

Foodie Websites- the Ridiculous and the Inspirational

I spent some time clicking through to some entertaining and motivational websites today… fascinating what we have available on The Web, isn’t it? Amusement, education and debauchery, all in one spot. Mind blowing, no? You Tube’s “Minimum Trip” is a channel that features miniature food preparation. The channel was featured on a morning news show, recently, and I bookmarked it to come back to eventually. I finally did, going through several of their videos… kind of left me speechless (not an easy feat). My first thought as I watched teeny-tiny shrimp get turned into tempura was “OH MY GOSH, KIDS, COME SEE, IT LOOKS LIKE SOMEONE IS FRYING SEA MONKEYS!!”

There is no music, only the sound of food prep and cooking and a whole lot of closeups of miniature food, little bitty cooking stations and doll house furniture.
What a trip! Interesting, to say the least. The boy and I decided that we liked it, though, and that he now wants to show his friends.

On a completely different scale is NeverSeconds. This is a fabulously interesting site featuring the observations of a young school-aged girl (nine years old at the start), blogging with her father to show what we are offering our children in the lunchrooms of the western world and beyond. Since beginning the blog in 2012, the family has gone on to publish a book on the whole experience (“Never Seconds- The Incredible Story of Martha Payne”), as well as spur on an impressive amount of fundraising for schools in Malawi with Mary’s Meals– these posts from March 2013, “Meeting Malawi’s Madame President,” and from May of 2012 are a great overview.
Click on through these underlined links for an international lesson about school lunches and what can happen when a family’s experiment collides with the blogsphere, social media, and local and international media. I’m pretty sure I’ll be buying Martha’s book.

Here’s to Web Exploration!

February’s Project: Learning to use a Nikon DSLR

January has come and gone so I need a a project for the month of February. I am ready to jump into learning how to use this fabulous camera that the family gave me for Christmas- a Nikon D3300. I have no goals to set with this project because at this point, I have NO idea how to use this grand device. But Imma gonna learn!!

I’ve been interested in photography for some time and am blown away with what I have captured using either a Blackberry or iPhones-

Blackberry, 2009; Treasures Collected, Morro Bay, CA
Blackberry, 2009; Treasures Collected, Morro Bay, CA

I love this photo of treasures we collected from Moro bay in 2009.

Taken with a Blackberry Curve

I went on to snap even better pics with iPhones- 3s, 4s and 5s models-

Cedar and Mistletoe Idyllwild, Ca iPhone 4s
Cedar and Mistletoe
Idyllwild, Ca
iPhone 4s
Boston All Saints Way 2011
Boston MA North End, All Saints Way iPhone 4s
Jelly Beans
Feeling snacky? Easter, 2014 iPhone 5s

I started a board on Pinterest to keep my favorite photos that I had taken all in one spot:

…or two:

I can’t wait to see what I can learn to do with a much better camera!

January’s Project: How do I Drive This Thing?

Just do what the guy says and we will all be safe...
Just do what the guy says and we will all be safe…

Three days into January and I’m still finding something new to do. Every day! WOO HOO! What are the bets that I can keep this up for another three days?

How about a project for the month? That sounds good to me. To quote the great Captain Picard, I’ll “Make it so.”

JANUARY’S PROJECT:

FIGURE OUT HOW IN THE WORLD DOES ONE SET UP AND MANAGE A BLOG?

(Now that I’ve dated myself with that ST-TNG reference above, I’ll get to the point…)

Hopefully, by the end of the month I will have figured out how to incorporate pictures, establish links with social media sites, choose what this blog will look like on screen (WordPress calls this the THEME, see? I am learning, YOW!) And while I figured out what a sticky post is,what the heck is a slug?

Lucky for me search engines exist, and these three sites will be great helps in this project:

From WordPress-

http://learn.wordpress.com/get-started/

A great infographic-

http://www.topwebhostinggeek.com/how-to-use-wordpress-features-and-functionalities-infographic.htm#sthash.PmdOKhSg.dpuf

And a whole ton of links and explanations from WordPress blogger Gretchen Louis-

http://gretchenlouise.com/become-savvy-inside-wordpress/

So, if you are an experienced blogger and have some great tips for a n00b like me, please share! What did you do to learn how to navigate WordPress, Blogger or your platform of choice?

Jean Luc Picard says "Here's to you, awesome n00b blogger!"
Jean Luc Picard says “Here’s to you, awesome n00b blogger!”
Everyone should try new things every day!
Everyone should try new things every day!

Branching Out? Or… Going Out On a Limb?

Looking for a blog about reinventing yourself? Starting new and healthy habits for the New Year? This isn’t it. Nope!
How about a blog about trying something new? Yep! You’ve found the right spot on the Intertubes. This is the place to be.
Come Be
With Me
In Twenty-Fiftee…
(Just trail off and say the “n” a little quietly behind your hand. You’ll sound so cool, I promise.)
First: figure out how to navigate through the Blogsphere of WordPress.
Wish me luck!
(She descends down into the deep, dark hole of the labyrinth know as The Web.)